Innovation is a common topic of discussion as companies race to find and retain top talent at their companies. We’ve all heard about innovation success stories in the workplace, most notably, Google’s “20 percent time,” a program which gives employees the freedom to spend 20 percent of their paid time as they please, gave birth to some of its more iconic products including Gmail and Google Earth.”
But what about recruiting? How can we re-think, re-engineer and innovate our recruiting and talent acquisition teams?
Episode 86: Reinventing Recruiting with Innovation with Tegan Trovato (@tegantrovato)
Tegan sat down with me while I was in Chicago this week to talk about re-inventing recruiting. I have a particular interest in this topic because of my new role as VP of Talent Strategies of Advanced Group. Tegan first talks about what innovation in recruiting is. She says it doesn’t have to be super sexy and revolutionary. It needs to be effective and enhance your current efforts. It can be as simple as making enhancements to the candidate follow up process once they are tied to a requisition. It might not make sense to eliminate job postings from your hiring and recruitment process. We can’t all be Zappos.
Tied to innovation and invention in recruiting is re-calibrating, which starts with taking a consultative approach to understanding your current talent acquisition process. We need to have an understanding of our current needs and processes in order to build an effective strategy.
What if You’re Not Ready to Innovate in HR & Recruitment?
Tegan compares innovation and change in recruiting to going to the gym. Our innovation tolerance level is directly tied to our past history. Maybe we’re just starting out at running. We can’t expect ourselves to run a marathon. Your innovation and change tolerance level is exactly the same. Zappos didn’t just one day wake up and decide to eliminate those job descriptions and Tegan’s previous employer wasn’t immediately ready to build a very robust mentorship and in-house training program. There were lots of baby steps to drive them to the innovation that happened along the way.
5 Big Buckets to Organize and Understand Your Innovation Stretch Goals
This “stretch goal” you have in mind can be used as an ending point. It’s then where to begin to establish the path to get there which is littered with smaller goals building towards the ultimate goal and achievement. Tegan’s five buckets are 1) Reporting, 2) The Candidate and Hiring Manager Experiences, 3) Technology, 4) General Operational Soundness and Compliance and 5) Training and Upskilling Your Team.
This podcast was action packed and I personally learned a great deal, some of which I’m going to be implementing as we build my own team’s stretch goals at Advanced Group.
Connect with Tegan Trovato on LinkedIn and her company Workplace Forward.
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*A special thank you to my production team at Total Picture Radio.
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